When Football Manager 26’s new UI drew heavy criticism from the franchise’s most vocal players, Sports Interactive suggested fans try using a controller. That comment set off a firestorm in the community and fueled the belief that FM26 might be the first entry designed primarily with consoles in mind. And because the beta was PC-only, players had no evidence to prove otherwise.
Then launch day arrived, and footage of the console version began circulating. And oh boy… it’s pretty bad.
In a post to the r/footballmanagergames subreddit, user Clapd_Frothy327 showed footage of a match being played in Football Manager 26 on the Xbox Series X. And in the case that you can’t see the embedded video above, it’s rough. The frame rate is incredibly choppy, and the visuals look atrocious — one could absolutely say it’s unplayable. Mind you, this is on a Series X, a console that can handle most of the best games on the market at 4K and 120 FPS, so running the Unity-powered Football Manager 26 (which resembles an early Xbox 360 game) shouldn’t be too tall a task.
Footage of FM26’s performance on console spread quickly, and the community response has been a mix of disbelief, anger, and resignation. Some players were stunned that a management sim — one not known for heavy graphical demands — was running this poorly on modern hardware. One commenter put it bluntly: “It’s insane they can’t get the match engine to run properly on modern consoles — it looks like a fancy PS2 game.”
Others leaned into sarcasm. Several joked that the match engine had become “PowerPoint Manager,” while one person quipped, “FM 2–6 frames per second.” Another compared the performance to a remote desktop session running on a dial-up delay.
But underneath the humor, there’s frustration. Longtime players argued that SI spent two years shifting the UI toward a controller-friendly layout — “force shifting us to console” — only for the console version to run poorly anyway. One player summed it up: “They broke the PC version just to publish this […] on console.” Others went further, calling the studio “lazy” or suggesting leadership changes.
Either way, seeing performance like this on console is disheartening and disappointing.
